The battle for intellectual freedom took a leap forward this week when 150 leading writers, academics and activists signed an open letter denouncing the ‘restriction of debate’ and warning of the costs to justice and freedom.
The group say they applaud the recent ‘needed reckoning’ on racial justice, but argue that it has fuelled the stifling of open debate.
The letter, published by Harper’s Magazine, denounces what it calls the ‘vogue for public shaming and ostracism’ and the ‘blinding moral certainty’ of those behind such strategies.
The signatories state that the free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. They condemn ‘disproportionate punishments’ meted out to targets of public shaming by institutional leaders conducting ‘panicked damage control’.
‘We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement.’
Best known
Below is a list of 25 of the 150 signatories who would probably be best known by South Africans:
- Martin Amis
- Anne Applebaum
- Margaret Atwood
- Ian Buruma
- Noam Chomsky
- Roger Cohen
- David Frum
- Malcolm Gladwell
- Jonathan Haidt
- Adam Hochschild
- Coleman Hughes
- Michael Ignatieff
- Wendy Kaminer
- Garry Kasparov
- Khaled Khalifa
- Wynton Marsalis
- John McWhorter
- Cary Nelson
- George Packer
- Steven Pinker
- Neil Roberts
- JK Rowling
- Salman Rushdie
- Gloria Steinem
- Bari Weiss
One signatory – Matthew Yglesias co-founder of the website Vox – was rebuked by colleague Emily Van Der Werff, a trans woman, because his signing the letter ‘makes me feel less safe at Vox’.
But Van Der Werff said she did not want Yglesias to be fired or apologise because it would only convince him he was being ‘martyred’.
Signatory Jennifer Finney Boylan, an author and transgender activist, apologised for signing the letter tweeting ‘I did not know who else had signed that letter’.
‘It’s hard to take claims like this seriously, especially when it’s plain that people are complaining about an unprecedentedly free and open speech environment,’ tweeted journalist Osita Nwanevu.
Delusions
Thus are the delusions of the woke orthodoxy.
YouTube has become the leading space for cancelling contributors irrespective of their political persuasion or the reasonableness or accuracy of their views.
The ‘gauleiter-in-chief’ is Susan Wojcicki, the CEO. Wojcicki was named one of Time‘s 100 most influential people in 2015 and described in a later issue as ‘the most powerful woman on the Internet.’
Under Wojcicki, YouTube has tightened its policy on videos it regards as potentially violating its policies on hate speech and violent extremism. The more stringent policies came after The Times showed that ‘ads sponsored by the British government and several private sector companies had appeared ahead of YouTube videos supporting terrorist groups’ and several large advertisers withdrew their ads from YouTube in response.
The tightened policies have been criticised as censorship. Some YouTubers argue that the demonetisation system is way too strict, causing any remotely ‘edgy’ content to be demonetised and sometimes resulting in the channel being removed.
Prager U, which is a respected, conservative site and an ‘extremely influential online resource for explaining the concepts that “have made America great”’. The site’s videos have had over 3,5 billion views.
200 videos ‘restricted’
PragerU has had over 200 videos ‘restricted’ by YouTube. This means they cannot be played beyond the portal in educational institutions including schools and libraries. The videos include the following which are worth listing just to see the subjects and presenters who have been restricted:
- The Contribution the Ten Commandments made to Civilisation – Dennis Prager;
- Why I Left the Left – Dave Rubin;
- Facts Don’t Care About Your Feelings – Ben Shapiro;
- Dear Celebrities, No One Cares What You Think and Playing the Black Card – Candace Owens;
- Do 97% of Climate Scientists Really Agree? – Alex Epstein;
- Does Free Speech Offend You? and The Least Free Place in America – Greg Lukianoff;
- Gun Rights Are Women’s Rights – Katie Pavlich;
- What Matters Most in Life? – Dennis Prager;
- Why is Modern Art so Bad? – Robert Florczak;
- Why America Must Lead – Anders Fogh Rasmussen;
- Dangerous People Are Teaching Your Kids – Jordan Peterson;
- What Is Fake News? – Andrew Klavan;
- Is America Racist? and Black Fathers Matter – Larry Elder Larry Elder;
- Black, Millennial, Female and… Conservative – Antonia Okafor;
- Why Don’t Feminists Fight for Muslim Women? – Ayaan Hirsi Ali;
- Why America’s Military Must Be Strong and Churchill: The Man Who Saved the Free World – Andrew Roberts ;
- Are the Police Racist? – Heather Mac Donald;
- Are You on the Wrong Side of History? – Jonah Goldberg;
- Are Some Cultures Better than Others? – Dinesh D’Souza;
- Israel: The World’s Most Moral Army – Colonel Richard Kemp;
- An Arab Muslim in the Israeli Army – Mohammad Kabiya;
- Is the UN Fair to Israel? – Anne Bayefsky;
- BDS: The Attempt to Strangle Israel – Alan Dershowitz;
- How’s Socialism Doing in Venezuela? –Debbie D’Souza;
- What’s Wrong with Socialism? – Ami Horowitz.
The list of signatories to the letter in Harper’s Magazine speaks for itself in revealing how intolerant the gatekeepers of the Left are. Would an equivalent list of 25 experts of the woke left contain names as august as these?
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